


i'll keep your brittle heart warm

by hoko_onchi



Series: Lives Well Lived [4]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Don't even try to hate, Established Relationship, Inspired by Taylor Swift, M/M, Songfic, quarantine feelings, yep that's right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25491883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoko_onchi/pseuds/hoko_onchi
Summary: Quentin listens to Taylor's new album, 'folklore.' He has a lot of feelings.--He marks his days with these little moments, spots of golden sun playing over the dark walls around him. And the brightest spot is—always has been—Eliot.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Lives Well Lived [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1842493
Comments: 18
Kudos: 65





	i'll keep your brittle heart warm

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know where this came from. CW for mentions of 9/11, pandemic, Quentin's history of depression and canonical death.
> 
> Songs quoted include, in order: epiphany, the 1, illicit affairs, august, hoax, exile, peace, invisible string.

The clock is supposed to tell time between Earth and Fillory, and that already has Quentin sort of up in his feels. He also hasn’t left the apartment in three weeks. The city is more or less open, but New Jersey more or less _isn’t_ , and that’s where their apartment is. They’re thinking about moving back to Brooklyn and getting a dog when things are normal, but things are pretty fucking far from normal, and this whole year can actually go fuck itself. 

Life is supposed to be less complicated when you come back from the dead and avert the apocalypse for the third time. Or that’s the thing he keeps telling his therapist in his Telehealth appointments. 

_You know that’s not the way it works, Quentin. Life keeps on with its complexities._

Yeah, no shit, Doug. Doug can go fuck himself, too.

He lifts one of the the tiny clock hands with a little tut he adapted from Eliot’s big, showy telekinesis, holding it mid air and rotating, tapping at the pieces of the spell with his mind, trying to discern how it lost its connection to Fillory. He closes his eyes and slips into that zen state he uses to asses the breaks in the spell work, the pieces that want to be whole again. He thinks, sometimes, that mending spells should work on people—on broken brains and archaic governments, on elections and systemic racism, on a pandemic that has ended so many lives. But those are massive problems, and he uses magic to fix small things—clocks and watches, magic lenses, bags with Mary Poppins spells gone wrong. Eliot always tells him, _that’s not nothing_ , but sometimes he feels like it’s exactly nothing. He fixes these small things that privileged magicians buy at antique magic shops and bring to Quentin, paying him more money to fix them. Yeah, his customers are happy. He’s really fucking good at this. His magic is fine-tuned to it, and Sunderland said his thesis was _brilliant_ , and his doctoral work isn’t half bad—could be _revolutionary_ , she’d said, once it's all done. Quentin is whole and alive and real. And everything in the big wild world is still irreparably broken. And it’s going to be, sort of indefinitely, he thinks. 

He puts on his headphones, still holding up the clock hand, poking into the magic. He puts on ‘Epiphany’ because it’s—it hits at that little place inside of him, separate from the workaday depression he’s lived with since he started growing into his brain in his early teenage years. The place that bloomed in his brain starting in March, when his life— _everyone’s life_ changed in the course of a few days. When the city he loved had become a war zone, overrun with something beyond anything he’d seen, beyond even the days after September 11th, when school had closed, and his dad had wept and wept over his cousin who been at work in one of the towers. He’d tried to comfort his father, but he hadn’t known exactly how—he wasn’t even out of elementary school, and the world had basically _ended_. And now it was ending again, but the attack feels like it’s from the inside, an invasive, insidious bloom of poison spreading out its roots and winding its way into all the good things.

_Only twenty minutes to sleep  
But you dream of some epiphany  
Just one single glimpse of relief  
To make some sense of what you’ve seen_

It’s heavy, like that, the weight of the world. The front lines of this war keep drawing closer, unaware that there are supposed to be boundaries, that life is supposed to be easy and good after you’ve been through all the hard shit. Quentin had left all of the apocalyptic garbage behind—another generation of magicians could deal with magical crises, with the broken pathways that lead to other worlds and the still sorta fucked up cycles of the moon. 

Something clicks with the spell, and the clock hand hums happily. The connection repairs itself like—like webs of plasma and white blood cells forming over a cut, leaving fresh new skin beneath. Maybe altered, but just as strong. Quentin doesn’t know the original spell—he doesn’t work with temporal shit; he’s had enough of it. But he can _repair_ it, restore all the links and let them _be_ again. 

It’s confusing, sometimes, to relish these little victories—bright spots of something new and good, when his brain is still broken and the world is—broken, too. He can’t even parse the difference between the grip of his own depression and the meltdown of the country, all the persistent madness on this imperfect planet. 

He marks his days with these little moments, spots of golden sun playing over the dark walls around him. And the brightest spot is—always has been—Eliot. 

A lot of the songs on this album make him think of El. He’d resent being an _emo Taylor Swift song, Quentin_. But. It puts in perspective all the trauma he’s still trying to process in therapy, gives words to it. She has a way of doing that even if _she didn’t write all the lyrics herself, Quentin._ ’The 1’ puts him in mind of the endless stretch of days after the throne room—they were so desperate to bring magic back, and Quentin couldn’t process the realization that he was in love with Eliot, that he _had been_ for—a long time, maybe. That they’d spent all those years together, and it hadn’t mattered to Eliot, that it was just another weird thing that magic had done to them. And he’d rather forget it all than face the fact that their life had been beautiful, that they _had_ chosen each other, again and again, that they’d been _married_ , for absolute fuck’s sake. 

_We never painted by the numbers, baby  
But we were making it count  
You know the greatest loves of all time are over now  
I guess you never know, you never know  
And it’s another day waking up alone _

Quentin swallows hard, not even the littlest bit ashamed at the prickling behind his eyes, the slight tightness in his throat. He lowers the clock hand, and it clicks into place on the clock face, engraved with Fillory’s moons, a painting of Earth’s constellations overlaid in paper-thin glass spelled to be unbreakable. He shakes out his hands, cracks his knuckles, willing the muscles in his arms and shoulders to relax so that his fingers can move through the intricate tuts required to touch the edges of magic in the clock. He lifts the Earth clock hand and twists it, biting his lip and leaving it to hang. He puts on the spelled glasses he wears when he does work like this—Julia helped with the meta-comp, a clever set of enchantments designed to show the fibers of overlapping spell work. It’s not a foolproof way to assess the magic, but it’s a good addition to Quentin’s talent for mending. 

Eliot always— _always_ —tells him how good he is at magic, how clever his spell work is. Meanwhile, he’s off doing the heavy lifting shit, charming magicians across the world, designing portals between countries and blasting holes in the actual fabric of reality. Quentin’s work feels paltry in comparison, but he’s always had imposter syndrome when he comes to anything—but especially magic. Margo told him once he was their Harry, but he’s not. Or it didn’t seem that way. He was _Ron_. He was fucking _Neville_. And she’d said, ‘You think Voldy would be dead without Neville? Quiet magic is magic, too. Get the fuck over yourself.’ (Jo Rowling can _mightily_ fuck off, too. Certain people shouldn’t have fucking access to social media.) He tries to remember Margo’s thoughts on Neville when he’s repairing the tenth widget in a week, his neck in knots from hunching over.

And—Eliot comes home at the end of each day, sweeping in and kissing him breathless, massaging the knots out of his back and wrapping Quentin in his long limbs. And he can focus on that, too. Eliot is like—a ballast, holding shit together, even when Eliot is fucked up, too. God. He’d burn down the world for Eliot. He’s glad he doesn’t have to anymore. 

He’d never expected to be saved from the Underworld. His friends had forgotten him so thoroughly—that’s how it had seemed—when he’d spent all those endless stretches of time with the Monster, blood spattered and shaking with terror. He’d wanted to go numb in those days. And he couldn’t stop replaying, _but you’re not_ and _not when we have a choice_ on an endless, nauseating loop, thinking if he could just get Eliot back, nothing else mattered. Even if Eliot didn’t love him. It didn’t matter if he survived it—he hadn’t had that _exact_ thought; he’d felt it, though. 

_And you wanna scream  
Don’t call me ‘kid,’ don’t call me ‘baby’  
Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me  
You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else  
Look at this idiotic fool you made me  
You taught me a secret language I can’t speak with anyone else  
And you know damn well  
For you, I would ruin myself  
A million little times_

“Fuck,” he says. “Jesus _fuck_.” It’s, you know—the music and the madness—and the ruined piece of this fucking clock. The Earth hand is a mess of jagged magic. He cracks his neck and starts plucking each of the threads apart, suspending the magic above the hand as he sifts through it and looks for the little broken thing at the heart of it. 

He’d thought about it so many times. Why he’d gotten this whole other life at the mosaic, how it had _changed him_ , and he’d thought it had changed Eliot, too. He kept looking for evidence. Eliot had hidden it beneath all of his layers if it was even there at all. And Quentin had— _pined_ , like he did after Julia. After Alice. Except this time, he could feel himself breaking apart, like. Physically. Psychically. In all the ways a person can break. 

_But I can see us lost in the memory  
August slipped away into a moment in time  
‘Cause it was never mine  
And I can see us twisted I the bedsheets  
August sipped away like a bottle of wine  
‘Cause you were never mine_

And he’d broken. A final time. He’d thought, when he died, that fifty years together hadn’t meant anything to Eliot, less than nothing. That was fine—he could go, and at least, his life could have some meaning in stopping Eliot. In saving Jules and Alice and Eliot, the people he’d loved most in the world besides his father. And then—he could be with—well, the other people he’d lost. He can’t even— _think their names_. Not now, not in the midst of all this madness. That’s—that’s therapy for a different day. 

_Don't want no other shade of blue but you  
No other sadness in the world would do_

He’d been trapped in that Underworld waiting space, a void. Bodiless and senseless. There hadn’t been peace there, not like he’d expected.

The magic is endlessly, tragically _fucked_ on the Earth hand, and he works and works until the afternoon sun shifts, washing his work table in golden light. 

_You’re not my homeland anymore  
So what am I defending now?  
You were my town, now I’m in exile, seein’ you out  
I think I’ve seen this film before  
So I’m leaving out the side door_

He pulls one of the threads, sea green like Eliot’s eyes—a maudlin thought. He smiles a little, though, because when he pulls it back, he can see the root of the thing, knotted and tense. Nudging apart with the tiniest movement of his finger, he extricates the core, the heart of the spell, and he smoothes it out, like brushing out strands of tangled hair. (Teddy’s hair hand tangled so badly when it was long. There wasn’t conditioner in Fillory.) The thought jolts him, but he holds the magic steady, letting the pieces fall into place. He hums, content, lowering the hand over the other, right where it’s supposed to be. There’s a little surge of pretty, pink-tinged energy that puts Quentin in mind of a sunset. It feels a little like closure on this bad-brain day—and maybe it’s really a medium-brain day because he hasn’t been in bed all day, has he? That’s a marker of some success.

He feels—rather than hears—the door open behind him, a change in the air of the room. He’s still blasting Taylor. Fuck his ears. They’re only, like, two years old. They can stand a little exposure that music that is—almost certainly—too loud for a normal human. 

_And you know that I’d swing with you for the fences  
Sit with you in the trenches,  
Give you my wild, give you a child  
Give you the silence that only comes when two people understand each other  
But I’m a fire, and I’ll keep your brittle heart warm  
All these people think love’s for show  
But I would die for you in secret  
The devil’s in the details, but you got a friend in me_

There’s a hand on his shoulder, and it’s Eliot, with his big eyes, long-lashed, deep and kind. 

Quentin pulls his headphones down so they sit around his neck. Honestly, noise-canceling headphones are the world’s best invention for people with disorganized brains. They put a limit on the din of the world. He can hone in, shut out everything. But—he can always feel Eliot. 

“Hey. Good day?” He brushes a lock of hair behind Quentin’s ear, kisses him on the forehead.

Quentin smiles—because it’s Eliot, and Eliot makes him smile—and he nods. “It was good. I fixed this clock—or. It’s well on its way to being fixed.” 

“Margo’s clock, right?”

“Yeah. It’s—it was all knotted up. I helped it get all smoothed out again. It’ll work now—with a few tweaks. I can restore the exterior, too. It’ll be—it’ll be nice for them to keep track of time. So they know, you know, what day it is here. Or you know, weird time skips.”

Eliot nods. “You’re so good at that.”

Quentin huffs. “Yeah, I do okay.” He grabs Eliot’s hand. “You were—safe, today? The people, you know—wore masks and all that?”

“Yeah, no worries. I’m home now, Q. I’m taking a long weekend, too.” 

“We could look at that place in Brooklyn.” 

“We should.” Eliot pulls him up and into his arms, and he removes Quentin’s headphones, puts them on his work table. He kisses Quentin, deep and hot, and it makes Quentin go limp and liquid in his arms. He smells like clean sweat and the outside, a residual trace of his magic on his clothes—amber and citrus. Eliot is all comfort and home, and he’s strong and real. He was the one who came for Quentin, when he was alone in the darkness, his strong hand reaching for out and bringing him back to the world when he was lost to it, stuck behind that door and unable to move on. And now he’s back here—has been for two years now—and the world is _fucked_ , but at least he’s in it. At least there’s a chance that, one day, it won’t be quite as bad anymore. 

And if Eliot is here, with him, at the end of each day, that’s one good thing that doesn’t vanish when the walls are dark and closing in. He’s steady and warm, Quentin can hold onto him in the melee, in the storm, when he’s lost and hopeless. 

‘ _Time, wondrous time gave me the blues and then purple-pink skies,_ ’ he thinks, even though it’s corny and—whatever, Eliot cries at ‘Dear Theodosia’—and these songs just _stay with him_. _’And isn’t it just so pretty to think, all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?’_

Destiny is bullshit, maybe. But sometimes it’s nice to slip into the idea of fate, especially when it makes the medium days good ones and the bad ones tolerable. When it’s Eliot, he thinks it’s good that the invisible string of their life in Fillory connects them, keeps them untangled and smoothed out and whole, pieces working together in harmony. 

A bright spot when everything else is dim.


End file.
